


A North Star in Our Soul

by dinodo



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Emotions, F/F, Gen, Male-Female Friendship, Platonic Soulmates, Romantic Soulmates, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, the rules for this soulmate thing make no sense but whateverrr, where did i get my colour meanings? my brain theres no deeper explanation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-01
Updated: 2020-02-01
Packaged: 2021-02-27 18:22:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22500118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dinodo/pseuds/dinodo
Summary: There are three potential meanings to a red soulmark, three ways to be tied to someone through death. Daisy has never been surprised that both of her marks bled into existence as angry, vivid, crimson. She’s never been a peaceful woman, never deluded herself into thinking she could live life without re-soaking her hands in blood whenever they began to look too clean. She is surprised, though, to realize neither of her marks stand for killing.
Relationships: Basira Hussain/Alice "Daisy" Tonner, Jonathan Sims & Alice "Daisy" Tonner
Comments: 22
Kudos: 270





	A North Star in Our Soul

Daisy sees the mark for the first time the very same instant that it bleeds into brilliant colour. She’s hauled the Vast avatar into her car first, tossed his unconscious body across worn backseat carelessly. He won’t have time to fret over the discomfort, anyway.

The Archivist is stood still, a few paces away, where he’d stopped when he was finished helping her pull the body out of the house. Not enough of an idiot to think he’s got a hope in hell of running, apparently, and Daisy almost feels a pang of regret at that. She’s not always in the mood for a physical chase—the metaphorical one is just as fulfilling, most of the time—but with these creepy, _knowing_ fuckers, well. It isn’t even so much about making it more enjoyable for her as it would be making it more terrifying for him.

Looking at him now, though, she thinks that might be unfortunately difficult to achieve. He’s shaking as she waves her gun in the direction of the passenger’s seat, his heavily bandaged hand held tight against his body, but he keeps his balance and slides into the car. Normally, Daisy would take little joy in a kill like this one—a weak, sick animal, damaged and isolated and slow, picked off from the herd so easily that the chase is over before it begins. But. _But._

She slides into the driver’s side of the car, settles herself, looks over to see her passenger’s lips twitch, once, twice, as if preparing to speak. Her hand is around his throat before anything more than a soft noise of pain can escape.

“You open your mouth once without my asking, and I’ll kill you right now.”

He clamps his mouth shut. Daisy leaves her hand there for a moment, fingers crushing in barely a fraction too lightly to do permanent harm, and stares him dead in the eyes, watching the fractious waves of fear behind them crash and recede, crash and recede.

It’s then that she feels it, a lancing heat that shoots across her left shoulder. The Archivist’s lips press together and thin in the same instant, and a pained noise is pulled from him, just at the edge of Daisy’s hearing. His eyes flick down to his forearm, and hers follow.

The tattoo on his skin there is too perfect to be artificial, the flat brown outline just the subtlest shade darker than his skin, barely noticeable unless you were looking for it. Until this instant, at least, as a brilliant red starts at the upper end of the shape and _bleeds_ down it in rivulets of colour, swirling and blending out to fill in the mark until, spiralling down the Archivist’s forearm, claws extended and face distorted into an unnatural snarl at his wrist, is the image of a terrible wolf, calligraphed in vibrant, angry red.

Daisy stares for a moment, then throws her head back and laughs, the sound harsh and tearing and beautiful in her throat. She doesn’t bother to check and see if the open, tattered book across her left shoulder bleeds too, just squeezes her hand just tighter around his neck, enough so that he has to strain slightly to breathe, and moves so that her face is a hairs’ breadth away from his. His eyes, she notices, have somehow become more terrified than before, and she is glad.

“Fate’s on my side today, I suppose. Dunno what I did to deserve it, but I’ll be _delighted_ to put an end to your miserable existence.” 

She holds him there a moment longer, breathing it in, exultant and vindicated at having been _chosen_ to rid the world of this murderer, this abomination. The Archivist breaths too, shakily, wheezing under her hand, and for a moment she thinks of doing it now, here, embracing her destiny immediately. But the hunt has always loved delayed gratification, always cherished the restraint in preparation and pursuit that makes the kill at the right moment so much sweeter. And so, reluctantly, she takes her hand from his throat. She brushes her fingers over her shoulder, feels the slight heat where her own mark has no doubt burst into colour against her skin. Then she grabs the steering wheel, steps on the gas, and swerves out of the parking lot, alight with the blazing, victorious surety of a kill guaranteed.

* * *

The Archivist lives.

Daisy would be angrier about that fact, if she hadn’t since realized that he, while a monster, is little more than a pawn in whatever game Bouchard’s playing just like the rest of them. Not that that absolves him of anything, of course. The moment she realized his fucking shirt was the same one from her dreams, she felt her resolve mere _inches_ from snapping, from putting a bullet in his head right then and there.

But she’s got bigger things to deal with first. Bouchard’s a higher priority, and if the scheme they’ve come up with will take him down, along with the creepy circus freaks, she’ll go with it. For now. Her mark is still red, so there’s still a bullet with the Archivist’s name on it that’s hers.

They might all die the next day, of course, but dying together will fulfil the crimson mark’s fortelling just the same. And honestly, Daisy isn’t afraid to die, not in the middle of a hunt, not when the blood is up and she’s overtaken by the pure, savage bliss of it all. Not when Basira will be at her side, because it’s what her other mark says, and its what her heart would say anyway if they had no marks.

Basira curls against her now, body fitted loosely and softly against Daisy’s own. Cool fingers trace across her right side and Daisy knows Basira is reassuring herself the way Daisy, too, has, countless times. Confirming that they are still together, still in sync. They are. The curved shield that wraps, warping from Daisy’s mid-back and down across her stomach remains as vivid as it has been since the moment Basira handed her a coffee and their hands brushed against each other, just slightly, for the first time. Warmth ebbs through it at Basira's every touch, and the deep red blends smoothly with the purple, whorls and soft gradients of colour filling the detailed lines. Someone told her once that it looked like a bruise, and Daisy had laughed, because who had ever said it wasn’t, really, death and love tied so closely as that.

“We’re not dying,” Basira says, quietly, against her shoulder.

“I’ve never gone into anything planning to,” Daisy replies.

“Sure.”

“I haven’t. And I don’t plan to now. It’s just a couple charges, nothing worth fretting over. I’d do it on my own—”

“No.” Basira’s hand stops moving, and Daisy looks down at her, sees the steel in her eyes, the flicker of anger at such a suggestion and the stubborn surety that has held and protected Daisy’s vulnerabilities and never wavered once in the time they’ve known one another.

“All right,” Daisy replies.

“When we’re done,” Basira says, interlocking her slim fingers with Daisy’s, “we should get a day off from all this supernatural bullshit. Just one, at least, before everything goes back to chaos.”

Daisy doesn’t reply, just bends, kisses the top of her head. Lifts Basira’s hand from where it’s linked with hers, brings it to her mouth, kisses that too, then holds it, still and smooth against her cheek.

Basira shifts, leaning back to at her. “We’ll be fine, tomorrow. We just have to be smart about it.”

Her eyes aren’t scared, or resigned. Instead, there is a fierceness in the depths of them that moves something inside Daisy, the way the Hunt does, stirring her to motion. Basira is no terrible, unseen god, has no unnatural power to push against reality, but somehow Daisy knows her mark is right. Knows that even now, in the calm, the intoxicating pull of the Hunt as distant as it ever is from her, with Basira beside her she’d face down any outcome just as fearlessly as she would were she at the climax of a hunt, utterly given over to the call of her god.

* * *

Dark.

Heavy, shifting earth.

Daisy struggles, for the first seconds—minutes—hours—days. Tries to breathe. Tries to claw her way out through sheer strength and sheer rage and sheer determination. But Basira is not here to guard her back and urge her forward and catch her when she feels like falling and giving up.

The Hunt is not here either. When she reaches inside herself for the wild, frenetic energy that has spurred her on in her weakest moments before, when she tries to think of Elias and the Archivist and all the other fucked up, twisted monsters in the world, tries to load her fury at their survival into the pistol she’s never known to miss, she fumbles, fumbles and—

There’s nothing. 

Its empty.

 _She’s_ empty.

She claws, frantically, in the dark of her soul for the power that has always fueled her, but its like trying to grasp the moon by reaching for its reflection in a pool of still, dark water. She sees it, and knows its absence, and despairs.

And then—

And then suddenly _Jon_ is there. Another voice in the darkness, another body in the crush, another person swallowed by the buried and doomed to an eternity in its ever-grinding jaws, but somehow he’s determined that that’s not to be. Somehow he’s here…for her.

Daisy’s hand reaches out, brushes across his forearm, and feels the slight increased heat that her contact causes in the mark she knows still covers it. A death mark that will never be fulfilled. She supposes living in an eternal, terrifying hell is close enough to dying together that it’s probably still red. This isn’t the sort of satisfaction she’s ever imagined it would give her.

But at least she’s not alone.

When they emerge from the Buried, the wolf on Jon’s arm, smudged and dirty as the rest of him, is red, yes. But shot through it are lines of brilliant yellow too, and Daisy doesn’t let go of his hand.

* * *

“I’d always thought it meant I’d get to kill you, y’know.”

“Huh,” Jon says, taking a long, slow drink and placing the bottle down with a contemplative look on his face. “So did I.”

It’s become routine, a ritual they complete every few nights or so when Jon has spent the day beating himself down and dreading the eventual confirmation of his inhumanity that sleep inevitably brings, and Daisy has struggled listen to the quiet for so long that she thinks she might go mad if she has to lie alone in bed and pray that the same silence lulls her to sleep soon. Jon has always had a tendency to overwork himself and hole up in his office for hours, but somehow he’s managed to extend that to the point where nobody’s sure when or if he goes home some nights. So these days when Daisy come in in the evenings, missing Basira and on edge and looking for anything to hold her down and convince her the half-life she’s living right now, starved and weak and skittish, is worth the pain, Jon is always there.

“I wasn’t—who I was back then, I—” She sits up slightly from where she’s stretched out on the couch in the Institute lounge, socked feet up on the cushions between them. “That’s not who I want to be. I…it’s important you know.”

Jon lets out a heavy breath, and tucks his feet up on the cushions too, so that his bent legs just touch her toes. A comforting warmth curls into the mark on Daisy’s shoulder at the slight contact. In the time since they’ve become friends, since Jon threw himself into the inescapable embrace of the too-close-I-cannot-breathe for her and dragged them both out, she’s realized that he’s probably a far more tactile person than he lets on. It’s restrained, slight touches to her back or her arm when he’s getting her attention, once or twice a slight bump against her side when she’s made a rare and particularly dry joke, but she thinks that Jon is at once desperate for that physical reassurance of someone alongside him, and terrified of it.

She looks down at her hands, picks at the ragged nails and rubs the rough callouses of her fingertips against one another. The fact that he’s accepted her, his former would-be killer, into that space tells her the reasons behind that aversion are the very opposite of what you’d assume from someone who carries as many scars as he does. She’s not surprised, really. Daisy may be the only other person who fully understands that fear, of handling something precious and fragile when you know you were only made to destroy.

“None of us are quite what we were then, are we?” Jon says softly, his eyes distant. “I wish—I wonder what it would be like without all of this, sometimes. I wonder if—If they’d—” He lifts a hand to his chest and traces it over his heart, gently, absently.

“Martin?” Daisy asks. Jon sighs.

“Right here,” he says. He undoes the top few buttons of his shirt, so Daisy can just see the creeping violet vines, twisting into a thick, dark, thorny mass over the left side of his chest. A lighter, delicate-looking rose sits at their centre, filled in with overlapping layers of translucent colour as though someone has painted the blossom in watercolour, right over his heart. “It feels—” he cuts off, laughs sharply, then sighs again “It’s always felt like it was meant as a protection, somehow.” He traces his fingers over the image again, then looks up at Daisy with a wry smile. “Lord knows I need it, now.”

Daisy thinks of Martin, pulling further into the fog daily with some plan of his own that he won’t, can’t divulge. She thinks of Basira, off on another mysterious mission, doing the same, in her own way. The ache there is sharp, yet vague, like a splinter that has lodged itself in her hand but whose precise location she can’t identify to remove it.

She thinks of the perfectly smooth human rib sitting in Jon’s desk drawer, and wonders what she’d be willing to give up, to save the people she loves.

After a long, heavy silence, she stands, walks out a few paces. “Basira’s is here,” she says, lifting her shirt just enough that Jon can see the edge of the shield curving across her right side. His brow creases as his eyes trace it slowly.

“Daisy,” he says, “I’m sorry.”

“It’s alright,” She replies, sitting back down, closer this time, cross-legged on the centre cushion of the couch. “At least it’s still there.”

“But it’s—”

“Fading. Yeah.”

“I’m—”

“S’not your fault. I’m surprised I still have it, sometimes. Faded’s better than nothing. It was eight months. She tried to let me go.”

Jon’s hand goes back to his chest, and Daisy wonders if that rose was a deeper violet eight months ago, too.

“Is it—has any colour come back, at all?”

“No.” she says. She looks down at her hands again, feels her mouth twitch. “I can’t—I don’t want to force it. And I’m different now. We’re both…different. It can’t be the same, ever, I don’t think.”

“She cares about you, Daisy. Very much.” Jon’s hand reaches out towards her, then pulls back, but she grabs a hold of it before he can retract it all the way.

“I know,” she says. “I know. That’s enough I—I think. I hope.”

Daisy folds her fingers into his and leans fully into his space, and Jon shifts to accommodate her as she rests her head on his shoulder. Neither of them mention the still-vivid crimson interspersed with the dull purple of the shield. Instead, Jon lifts his other hand and lightly touches the snarling jaws of the wolf on his forearm.

“You still could, you know.”

“'Course,” she says. But the nearly half of the red has been replaced by that warm yellow, now, and there are other ways to fulfil a death mark than by killing its bearer.

* * *

Eventually, everything falls into place without Daisy even trying.

There are screams and snarls coming from the Institute above. Elias has broken out of prison, Martin and Peter are heading for the Panopticon, Basira has gone to check on the chaos, and Daisy stands next to Jon and tries to breathe.

There’s a slowly intensifying warmth in her shoulder, in her side. Something tells her this is it.

“Jon,” she says, turning to him in the short moments before everything spirals uncontrollably downwards, “Whatever happens next. It was worth it. This…trying to be better. To be human. It was worth it.”

“I don’t—what are you saying?”

She smiles at him, sadly, but her teeth are sharp beneath her lips. “I’m glad I didn’t kill you.”

“I… _thank you_? I don't—”

But then Basira returns, and it all falls apart in earnest.

* * *

There are three potential meanings to a red soulmark, three ways to be tied to someone by death. Daisy has never been surprised that both of her marks bled into existence as angry, vivid, crimson. She’s never been a peaceful woman, never deluded herself into thinking she could live life without re-soaking her hands in blood whenever they began to look too clean. She _is_ surprised, though, to realize that neither of her marks stand for killing. But as she and Jon and Basira sprint through the Archives, she understands with sudden, jarring clarity what the marks are asking of her—what she’d give, anyway, if they didn’t exist.

Basira tells Jon to go. He looks back at the two of them briefly, eyes wild, and Daisy nods. As he turns towards the tunnels, she gets one last glimpse of the snarling wolf on his arm, and thinks for a second that the red in its fur has shifted, no longer a bloody stain around its jaws, but a series of fatal wounds, thick yellow fur matted around the bloody gashes in its sides.

Can a feral, uncontrollable beast like that be anything more than a monster? Can the vicious maw at Jon’s wrist become something that protects him, instead, just as the tangle of thorns on his chest protect his heart? Daisy hopes so.

Basira stands at her right side, gun out, prepared for it all to end with the two of them fighting side by side, and Daisy wishes for one second that she could let it. She’s never been afraid of death with Basira at her side. She’s always somehow thought they would charge into its clutches together, furious and wild as a storm, defiant and strong and together until the final moment.

But they’re out of sync. Have been, ever since the coffin. Daisy used to know Basira’s heart, could tell before she lifted her foot where and when and how far ahead it would fall. Now, though, the rhythm has changed, and Daisy is deaf to it. She wants to mourn the loss, but she’s been mourning it too long already, and however faded the purple, the shield on her side is still red.

If having lost Basira is what will allow Daisy to save her in the end, then so be it.

The marks become hotter, not painful yet, but close. She wonders if the scattering of tiny daisies, hidden on the back of Basira’s neck, burn too. It’s selfish, but she hopes that some of the faded violet filling them in remains, even after she’s gone.

Daisy steps in front of Basira, closes her eyes. Extracts a promise that will ensure their shared fate is fulfilled twice over if this doesn’t do it. But her marks are near-burning again, and she knows. Losing herself to the Hunt is death. This is what they’ve always been leading her to, to this offering, this end.

Killing. Dying together. Sacrificing for the other. Out of all the options, who would have thought that Daisy Tonner would ever be a martyr?

“ _Run,”_ she growls, and as the fire in her blood meets the now-searing heat of the marks and _rends_ her from herself, she thinks about Jon and about Basira and about protection and about humanity, and she hopes that this is enough.


End file.
